Hooray!!! is a group exhibition featuring, installation, paintings, prints and sculpture by Sakura Maku, Phil Lubliner, Sam Friedman, Matt Hollister and conceived and curated by Michael J. Olson and Andreis M. Costa.

This grouping of work discusses identity with familiar rhetoric, while investigating the excitement and fervor of homecoming champions revealing the calamity of defeat.

Sakura Maku, born in Japan and currently finishing her MFA at Yale Arts, strides the gap between the pride of victory and the resilience of the conquered. Maku’s work counters its own minimalist Japanese sensibilities with deliberate vintage kitsch to prologue a hybrid identity of an alien in their homeland.

Conjured from abstracted childhood memories and trans-American travels Phil Lubliner’s framed sculptures and typographic drawings are amalgamations of icons, slogan and American marquee. Language, in Lubliner’s case, becomes the language. Words and imagery carefully sculpted and formed on paper as objects discuss the artist’s conceptual and figurative tendencies. Lubliner, born in Chicago, is a Pratt Graduate who currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Sam Friedman, a Pratt Graduate born in rural New York moved to Brooklyn in 2002. Friedman presents us with large panels of collaged paintings where popular paragons exist in abstract landscapes of pattern and depth to symbolize strength, weakness and the sublime.

Matthew Hollister moved from rural Homesdale, Pennsylvania, to attend Pratt in 1998. Hollister has recreated produce boxes with icons from the bucolic farmland of his youth that traveled with him to the markets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. These objects set in the gallery space become a metaphor for the life of the artists. It is within the medium that Hollister discusses his rural uproot, urban implant and reactions to the change in aesthetic and environment.

This is the second curatorial project by Michael J. Olson and Andreis M. Costa, whose recent critically acclaimed collaboration American Concentration Camp featured the works of Dash Snow, Ry Fyan and Nico Dios.